Taking Games for Granite

Nitrogen Cowgirls

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:23:37 GMT

For some reason, most of my female acquaintances at school are working with nitrogen. Nitrogen in marine sediments, nitrogen in streams, nitrogen in teeth. I am working with nitrogen too. Some of the work we do is somewhat pedestrian, water-quality type fare, but some is rather cutting-edge work having to do with global climate change and evolution.

I'm amused by the glamorization of science these days, or at least of scientists and naturalists. Criminal forensics shows are hot, and so is Jeff Corwin. And a certain bent of adventurous maverick scientist has always been popular in certain types of literature. Arrogant crackpots who go out on limbs and end up saving the world. Or something.

For these reasons, I have decided that we shall discover some great Science Thing to do with nitrogen, and then there will be a book about us. It will tell the roller-coaster story of five women who fight the odds and the establishment to push the boundaries of science. It will be called "Nitrogen Cowgirls."

The really funny thing is, I am being totally honest. We are really right on the edge of what is possible, and some day it could make a good story. Well, that is not the funny thing. The funny thing is how absolutely bland the actual work involved would look to anyone who didn't know what was so important about it. The contrast gets me every day. I find the work fairly interesting but that's because I know what it means. Without that piece, I would have to say that, no, watching de-ionized water drain through a powdered fossil for half an hour before you can move on to the next step is not terribly stirring.

The other funny thing is that none of us is a rugged, arrogant maverick of science. Well, none of my friends is, at least. I am eccentric and a bit obnoxious sometimes, which might count. But everyone else is just a smart, nice woman. There is nothing controversial about them. I find this hilarious. I am determined to think of them as cowgirls. Because every smart, nice geek chick doing great things in a laboratory somewhere deserves to be memorialized with a little bit of glamor.

I have nothing to say

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:26:07 GMT

I was so sick over school break that I didn't get much done, including the BYOND game idea I have up my sleeve. I just had a blood test come back positive for ehrlichia, which is one of the tick-borne pathogens (which in general are quite common in my neck of the woods). I told my best friend. She said, "Oh, that's what Sophie had!" Sophie is her dog.

Still crazy after all these days

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:18:59 GMT

I should be doing homework, but I need a little self-expression break. Let me describe geology lab for you.

Woodward 328 is also known as "the venting room," where we get together for lab with the nice TA and everyone blows off steam in angry, wounded tones about how miserable the professor is making them, and the TA chuckles. And we try to do our work but horrible jokes and puns keep bursting into the silence and people laugh a little too hard and you can tell they're stressed. The room smells very vaguely of sulfur and the walls are covered with maps, and every available horizontal surface that is not a lab table has lots of rocks on it. Some of the rocks look like what you'd find if you walked outside the building and some are crazy, exotic, striped or odd colors. There are some tupperware containers with supplies you might want to use on rocks, like magnifying glasses and bottles of HCl. The big windows on the west side of the room look out over the unambitious hills of Rhode Island and we can see the sun set.

There is a box of rocks for us to identify on one of the tables. It could be rocks with trace fossils, remnants not of an organism's body but of its behaviors. We have been reading in our lab manual about the traces left by activities like burrowing, resting, feeding and at first glance it is completely obvious that none of the fossils in the box bears any resemblance to anything we've been reading about. They have lumps, random lumps, lumps that look nothing like burrows or like the imprint of a trilobite.

There is no one who will tell us what these are fossils of. There is no one who will tell us, see, this is what a burrow looks like. The TA is not allowed to give it away. It is perverse. So we guess at everything and after two hours, the lab is up and we still have half the rocks to go. So we come in on another day and sit in the quiet room and try to finish it on our own. And we hand in our sheets and next week we get them back and every one of them is wrong. And we do it again with some other rocks.

Lab bears a striking resemblance to class, in which the professor sends us forth with a problem to research, without any prior lecturing on either the problem or on, say, how to write the papers. And we get the papers back and he has been very attentive.

I am coming more and more to find this absolutely hilarious. The thing that's so funny about it is not so much the perversity of it all as the fact that none of us is, actually, being hurt by it. We happen to be learning after the assignment instead of before the assignment, and our grades suck, but other than that, all the moaning and groaning (and some crying, no doubt) is essentially over bruised ego. There is nothing inherently hurtful about going into an assignment totally blind, groping around pathetically, and having everything you do corrected with a red colored pencil.

In fact, I am beginning to enjoy it.

I'm not quite sure what's gotten into me, but more and more it's starting to seem almost fun to be thrown into the deep end of the pool every week. Maybe it's liberating to know that there's nothing you can do to avoid the red pencil, so you might as well let go of the idea of getting an A and just enjoy the fact that we are all in this thing together. And tell another stupid joke. Or maybe it's because I am starting to find myself swimming, sometimes.

It's been strange to look up after these painful months and see that I have improved a great deal in my understanding of rocks and in my writing, without much conscious intention. I was just trying to keep my head above water. And I think that's why the indignities of the class matter less to me now... it's results, just results. I look at how much improved my latest paper is and I suddenly do not care that no one will show me what permineralized bone looks like before I'm tested on it, that no one will lecture about Milankovitch cyclicity before we delve into jargon-saturated scientific papers about it, that the professor is short-tempered and scathing and occasionally erratic, that I have no idea what my grade is exactly at this point.

And at this point it would be wrong of me to characterize him as a devil when I am coming to feel not only the beginning of a deep gratitude but also a genuine fondness... he has proven to be a complex and generous man who has already given me a great deal, and I am, in actuality, touched. I have been disabused of many ideas this semester, several having to do with who (and what) I am capable of learning from. And it is a delightful thing to realize that true competence is a better prize than an A, better than someone's approval, better than being treated "nice." I suddenly do not care quite so much about those things.

It's funny but someone told me at the beginning of the semester: "The truth will set you free; the process will piss you off." I am still occasionally pissed off (and still, unfortunately, terribly busy) but right now all I can do is laugh.

Urrrrggghhh

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 11:20:16 GMT

This semester. My god. This class. Is killing me. Geology... they call it "rocks for jocks," right? Like it's supposed to be the "easy" physical science that even a linebacker could get a D in. I decided to pass up the UCONN geology program because I heard it wasn't much, and I moved to Rhode Island and worked for a year so I could go to URI on in-state tuition. For the geosciences program.

And--though I say this with great irony--I'm pretty sure I made the right decision. I was very impressed with the quality of the teaching last year, which was my freshman year, and I learned more than I ever have in any of the (many) classes I've taken my whole life (and I've been going to school on and off for 25 years now). And I really enjoyed myself.

But that was last year. I did not realize that my geo professor this semester was going to be Sergeant Slaughter in wire-rimmed glasses. We had our first field trip last weekend. We stopped at a nice rock outcrop and he gestured to it, saying, "Okay, go to it--WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?! GET BACK HERE! I thought I told you idiots 20 times that the first thing you do..."

I am going to have a heart attack. My professor is going to kill me. Jesus Christ. He is the Simon Cowell of geology. I have never felt so incompetent in my life. Our team has to write a term paper every few weeks... well, I guess that makes it not a term paper, just torture... in which we pour all our free hours (plus the requisite blood, sweat and tears) into some artless dissemination of fossil assemblages so that he can tell us how pathetic we are. Along with the powerpoint presentation and the other assignments.

I am so far behind in my other classes.

The thing is, this is all hilarious. It's hilarious because this is paleontology, and dinosaurs are fun, right? It's hilarious because the guy is not at all physically imposing; he looks like somebody's dad (which he is). And it's hilarious because I am a slightly uptight 4.0 student who has never been scared of a teacher in her life, and always thought it was ridiculous when my friends were. And now I am flailing pathetically and in absolute misery, and there is nothing else I can seem to do.

And it's slightly depressing because while I wish I could say the guy was just a jerk, I do not think he is just a jerk--that is to say, I think he is a jerk who knows his stuff, and might conceivably give us an A someday if we managed to figure out how the hell we're supposed to research and write these papers. (Did I mention he doesn't lecture?) And it's also slightly depressing that I'm starting to respect him at least as much as I hate him, which may validate my choice to enter the program but doesn't make it very easy to vent my misery with the other students.

Anyway, now you know what I've been up to. How are you all?

Back from vacation

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 14:43:14 GMT

No, I wasn't really on vacation the entire time I've failed to post. But I did just get back from vacation.

As you might have seen if you visited the Dream Makers guild, I've been working on a potential new BYOND book, and you can feel free to offer your comments on the chapters.

I have not been doing a whole lot at the computer other than that. I am apparently addicted to reality, and while I have trouble admitting I have a problem, I will admit that it is difficult these days to buckle down in front of a screen. All I can ask is that you not hold it against me and please play Night Fantastic.

Oh my gosh

Tue, 01 May 2007 14:15:00 GMT

I haven't been around much because I've been swamped with end-of-semester school work. But it won't be too much longer!

HeroMachine

Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:36:56 GMT

Looking for an easy way to make a portrait of your character? Use the HeroMachine. Below, a portrait of Cerulea's new Mahamut race.

The ides of March

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:32:51 GMT

ides
(pl.) c.1330, "middle day of a Roman month," from Fr. Ides (12c.), from L. idus "the eighth day after nones," a word perhaps of Etruscan origin. The 15th of March, May, July, and October; the 13th of other months.

Since it's mid-March, I was going to talk about Midmarch, but it's down at the moment, so we'll pretend it doesn't exist. Instead, play Night Fantastic!

New Forum

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 06:05:03 GMT

Way back, I created my own .dmb called zboards so I could create my own forums. I put one up on my catchall BYOND website, Zilal at byond.com, which suffered from a layout that displayed poorly in some browsers but which I didn't have enough knowledge at the time to fix. The little-visited forum has become stagnant, so I've created one for my site here (link in lower-left) where you can leave questions or bug reports.

Night Fantastic is back!

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 20:08:48 GMT

One of the oddest games on BYOND is getting its re-release. It's a unique horror game (and unlike Lex and GTP, you can play it single-player). You can now find it in my games listing. Thanks to all who helped with the testing tonight! I think I got all the bugs, but let me know if you find some more. Some amusing comments...

Akiyo says, "Lmao. Right as Zilal says turn it up. I turn it up. Guess what I hear?"
Jetman123 says, "Huh... hah... huh... hah..."

(Radio) Akiyo: "Ah damn, no bullets."
(Radio) Kashino: "STOP FEELING ME"
(Lounge) Jetman123 says, "He's doomed"
(Radio) Kashino: "oh my god"
(Lounge) Fujira says, "incoming!"
(Lounge) Halo Elite X says, "This is so funny!"
(Lounge) Halo Elite X says, "I wish this was real."
[That's a scary thought!]

Jeffrey S says, "this is the scariest game on byond, guys."